1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method of using dry etching to efficiently fabricate ultrafine structures having dimensions on the order of 10 nm on a substrate.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Conventional nanometric-scale fabrication procedures used in the manufacture of semiconductor devices such as ICs and LSIs have mainly used electron-beam lithography. However, a drawback of electron-beam lithography is that since it is a sequential process in which a pattern is drawn by scanning a tightly-focussed beam of electrons, it takes a considerable time to draw large numbers of nanometric-scale dots, for example, and thus has a low throughput. Ultrafine fabrication can also be done using optical lithography or X-ray lithography. However, while optical lithography does not have throughput problems, the working principle on which optical lithography is based makes it difficult to form pattern features shorter than half the wavelength of the light, so it cannot be used to form even 100 nm structures. As for X-ray lithography, the masks used are not fine enough, and resolution has not yet reached 10 nm.
An object of the present invention is to provide a method of efficiently fabricating ultrafine structures on the order of 10 nm.